Robots may replace us at menial tasks, but we are more likely to be moonlighting to advance our careers in the future.

The latest report from Adobe reveals that a majority (70%) of U.S. office workers report loving their jobs. In fact, they love work so much, they spend a lot of off hours thinking about it, and are likely to have a second job to help them improve the first.

This love fest stands in sharp contrast to several recent reports. According to Gallup’s most recent count, only 32.2% of respondents say they are engaged at work, while a recent study by the Marcus Buckingham Company, a management consultancy, found only 19% of U.S. employees reported being involved, enthusiastic, and committed.

Adobe’s findings, titled “Work in Progress,” were the result of surveying just over 1,000 U.S. office workers.The survey gauged their sentiments about the future of work. Read the rest of this entry »

Occupations with cognitive tasks that aren’t routine are adding the most jobs in decades.

The number of people in knowledge work jobs—that is, nonroutine cognitive occupations,has more than doubled in the last 30 yearsand there’s no sign of it slowing down.

In the past three decades, the number of jobs for knowledge workers has never been rising as quickly as it is right now.

As recently as the mid-1980s, you could categorize American workers into roughly three equal-sized groups of about 30 million people each. About 31 million people had nonroutine cognitive jobs, what is often called “knowledge work,” consisting of varied intellectual tasks such as professional, managerial or technical occupations. Just under 30 million people had jobs that consisted primarily of routine manual work—on assembly lines or in warehouses, doing physical tasks day after day. About 30 million people had jobs consisting of routine office work—bookkeepers, filing clerks, bank tellers and so on—work that doesn’t involve much physical activity but is highly routine and doesn’t necessarily require high levels of knowledge. A fourth, smaller group, did nonroutine manual tasks, such as many service occupations.

But over the past three decades, almost all job growth has come from the two categories of work that are nonroutine.Meanwhile, routine jobs have been under a lot of pressure, especially during periods of recession. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft, Intel and Apple each rose to dominance as if their fates were inevitable.

Of course, it never looks so clear as it’s happening. Shelves full of books have been written about these three companies and the outsized personalities who built them — Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs. In a new book, David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, are adding to that literature by applying a strategic framework to the corporate handiwork of the three, and find common themes. They call these shared features “Strategy Rules,” which is also the title of the book.

Mr. Yoffie and Mr. Cusumano have been studying these companies for nearly three decades and have been collaborating off and on for decades.

Initially, Mr. Yoffie was a specialist in corporate strategy, while Mr. Cusumano was an expert in software development and managing product teams. “David was developing high-level strategy, and I was focused on, O.K., how do you get this stuff done,” Mr. Cusumano recalled. Read the rest of this entry »

The LinkedIn founder says you are no longer in charge of your résumé in an interconnected online world, but neither is your boss.

For a stretch of asphalt that has seen trillions of dollars of wealth creation, Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., the Main Street of venture capital, is rather unassuming. A few bikers heading for the fog-covered hills, a Tesla passing a Prius, low-slung office buildings. One building houses Greylock Partners, where I sit in a conference room with entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, who has been in the middle of this wealth creation and now sees some of its destruction coming soon. “If companies haven’t embraced that they are operating in a networked age,” he says, “then they will probably be on their way to not surviving.”

The 47-year-old knows networks. Mr. Hoffman built his reputation by founding the business social-networking platform LinkedIn and serving as chief operating officer of the e-commerce site PayPal, both billion-dollar powerhouses. He was an early investor in YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, Zynga and, oh yes, Facebook.

He has a theory on what makes ventures work: understanding that information is no longer isolated but instantly connected to everything else. Call it the move from the information age to the network age. Mr. Hoffman thinks that the transformation is just getting started and will take out anyone who stands in the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Date: 16-01-2014
Source: The Economist
Subject: Technology and jobs: Coming to an office near you

The effect of today’s technology on tomorrow’s jobs will be immense—and no country is ready for it

INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.

Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, these two iconoclasts have disrupted multiple industries, but TED curator Chris Anderson goes much deeper and argues that what Musk and Jobs really have in common is a rare form of design thinking powered by unfettered conviction.

When future historians report human progress during the 21st century, they may conclude that one of the key moments took place a year ago in Elon Musk’s bedroom. His eureka! moments happen every few months. Sometimes during his morning shower, sometimes late at night before sleep, sometimes, as on this occasion, waking at 2 a.m.

This is how he described that moment to me: “I realized that a methane-oxygen rocket engine could achieve a specific impulse greater than 380.”

Okay, it doesn’t sound particularly historic. Until you realize that a rocket of that spec has adequate range to escape Earth’s upper atmosphere and travel to Mars. And that it so happens that Mars has plenty of carbon dioxide (CO2) and permafrost (H2O), which could be neatly converted into the aforementioned methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (O2). Which means you could create the fuel for the journey home right there on Mars itself. And that transforms the long-term economics of space travel between Earth and Mars because it means that you could send manned spacecraft to Mars without having to carry rocket fuel with you.

That’s right. Elon Musk genuinely believes that within the next couple of decades, humans will be colonizing Mars. And thanks to his early morning aha! moment, we will even be able to make the return trip. That would certainly be a useful line in the recruiting ads, unless, like him, you’re comfortable with the prospect of dying on Mars after helping build humanity’s second home.